SHAUN BELCHER WRITES

NORMAL TOWN POET

Author: shaun belcher (Page 17 of 20)

Poet, painter and songwriter originally from Oxfordshire now living in Nottingham.

Daily Short: Bernard MacLaverty – A Foreign Dignitary

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments 
friendship
In 'Friendship: 12 masterpieces of short fiction' for John McCarthy, Ryan Publishing Co. Ltd; First Edition edition (1990)
Also collected in:
"A Foreign Dignitary,in Best Short Stories 1989, edited by GilesGordon and David Hughes. 1989; as The Best English Short Stories 1989, 1989.

maclaverty
Walking the Dog and Other Stories. 1994.

A tricky one this. I have read quite a few of MacLaverty’s stories but not this one and was unprepared for this particular tale. A lot of his shorts revolve around Northern Irish themes so the sudden departure to ‘Non-Place’ as one reviewer terms it a jolt. The tale was spun in 1988 and first published in The New Statesman which is significant. It was later anthologised in a best of and the collection ‘Walking the Dog’ from 1994. In 2002 MacLaverty submitted a radio script of the story to BBC Radio Scotland. I do not know if it was aired.

1988 was two years into John McCarthy’s captivity. It was also the year Bush elder started to run for presidency, the Soviets started to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran stopped fighting. If any of these turbulent events affected the author is unknown but the fact that it selected for the ‘Friendship’ anthology and first published in New Statesman suggests it an advowedly ‘political’ fable.

I say fable because it a strange story. A ‘foreign dignitary’ of the title, whose manners suggest British rather than European background or from any ‘Western’ power, arrives in a ‘foreign’ city. He is welcomed and entertained by his male counterparts and two events take place. He is offered a ‘virgin’ as a gift for his personal pleasure and he is shown a barbaric means of imprisoning political dissenters (including children) whilst all other crimes are dealt with by reason and discussion.

A Voltaire like political fable? The offering of the child is sickeningly simplistic and believable but the incarceration of political prisoners in steel coffins that repeatedly smashed with a hammer when they disobey is a little blunt to say the least. It like a written version of a Polish animation of a boot stamping on a head ad infinitum. The message clear. Maybe it was written with the hostage situation in Lebanon in mind but MacLaverty has enough political demons closer to his actual home to fuel the tale too. The title story of ‘Walking the Dog’ concerns a man abducted in Northern Ireland.

The story is unforgettable and striking and probably a one-off in his overall career. It skilfully sets up the reader through the mild-mannered Manadarin’s charming habit of writing a letter to his wife. This gentle introduction sets up the blunt horrors to come. As for the ‘other’. The sense of a slightly all-encompassing’heathen’ nature of the barbarians is just this side of racist suggesting a kind of people ‘not like us’ …i.e. Eastern,or Islamic. Nowhere is this stated but the contrast is clear. I think if the tale had not crashed to the rapid and circling conclusion as he quietly writes a letter home as the child is tortured it would have become to complex to succeed.

A short parable that leaves the reader puzzled, sickened and possibly relieved it not longer. I felt bemused after reading.

Daily Short: Ron Hansen- Playland – 1989

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments

hansen

I had the idea of reading at least one short story a day. It sort of working and I have managed three so far this week. The first on Tuesday was Ron Hansen’s ‘Funland’ from ‘Nebraska’ a collection of short stories published in 1989. I purchased it at the time because of the cover which I later found out was a photograph by Wim Wenders. No apparent connection between the two artists just a lucky graphic design intervention I guess although film does connect to this story.

The collection contains a series of historical re-inventions or ‘factions’ that whilst starting from historical certainties and research lift off into unknown territories.  The collection was published after several more ‘historically’ accurate novels including the ‘Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford’ now a movie with Brad Pitt. Hansen went on to write several novels on historical themes. He is now the  Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor at Santa Clara University – San Francisco. Teaching fiction and screen-writing.

http://www.scu.edu/cas/english/faculty/hansen.cfm

warner2

Source: http://www.playlandspeedway.com/history.html 

‘Playland’ is a classic case in point. When first read in 1990 with no internet there was no chance of quickly and easily searching out images (see above) from the ‘real’ Playland or reading anything about its existence. Now I can,and whilst not spoiling the story (which I read first), it does provide an intriguing backdrop and filter on the writer’s intentions. The theme park started life as a dog track run by gangsters after the second world war and this adds a sheen to the tale which revolves around an  ‘innocent’ post-war couple. The story is seemingly set post or during WW2 as the cast mention various ‘Talkie’ stars like Peter Lorre and Betty Grable .

The introductory pages however create a ‘paradisical’ indeed a veritable Eden from the Depression created some time after  1918. This rather strange as the story suggests it long established as  the story unfolds in a vaguely 1920s to 1950s neverworld, perhaps deliberately. The real Playland was a more humdrum affair built in the 1940s and probably a place Hansen visited as a child.

The exotic and unreal nature of the tale is heightened by the landing of a  seaplane (just after a pelican!) carrying the ‘evil’ and rich protagonist. It is like something straight out of The Great Gatsby. He is the female ‘lead’s’ cousin (I say lead because the whole story so ‘filmic’) who is a sexual predator and  the essential ingredient in the plot’s progression and the final denouement. The atmosphere suggests Hansen playing with the dreams rather than the reality of Nebraskan lives.The imagery and lighting throughout is so dreamlike the whole story could be read as existing on a film set.

The structure is straightforward. The ending slightly open-ended and bristling with perverse sexuality. A very good short story not quite as draw-dropping as the tour-de-force ‘Wickedness’ that opens the collection and was featured in Tobias Wolf’s Picador anthology of Contemporary American Stories in 1993 but still very good.

This short is a  good read and suggests that ‘reality’ can be manipulated and used as suits even if twenty years later your reader can pick apart the reality from the imagined which affects all ‘faction’. Indeed where do we draw the line on historical authenticity and fiction these days when even historians questioning such notions? Is the image above any more real because sourced from the internet. it looks real but even that could  have been created by an ingenious graphic designer..maybe that is the entrance to another theme park..or hell.

A review at the time is interesting noting the precision of the writing at its best and its sloppiness at worst…but marks Playland as one of the ‘bests’

What makes the violence in these stories so powerful and disturbing is Mr. Hansen's meticulous control of his prose. The action of his tales is always carefully grounded in a welter of precise description (hens sitting on their nests ''like a dress shop's hats''; ''goldfish with tails like orange scarves''; a man who ''chews gum instead of brushing his teeth''), and the language constantly engages us by moving back and forth between the colloquial and the poetic, between the understated and the brutal.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: February 7, 1989
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/07/books/books-of-the-times-stories-that-call-an-evil-by-its-name.html

Poem for poetry day – My Father’s Crashes

October 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

A poem I started in 2010 and finished yesterday…

DSCF0669

My Father’s Crashes

 

We could tell by the engine

When my father’s truck was home.

The diesel engine would vibrate

The windows as he reversed in.

 

My mother would boil the kettle at 5pm

Knowing he would arrive.

Three times in five years he did not

Arrive on time.

 

One time back-ended by a Lotus

That shattered like an Xmas bauble.

He spent half an hour prising glass fibre shards

From the wheel arch.

 

Another time he and my Uncle John

Arrived ashen faced.

Drank tea before they talked.

Both cheated death as a car span toward them.

 

Finally he retired and bought a smaller van

But grew tired of working then grew tired

As the cancer ate away his stomach.

My mother made tea at five pm every day just the same.

 

Until one day he didn’t make it.

 

 

 

Edwin Smith photograph commission

October 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments

RIBA5545house2

35 Hallam’s Lane, Chilwell near Nottingham, 1937

A strange day. I was going to go to studio and write all day but I got knocked sideways by this request. Apple and Snakes and R.I.B.A. have commissioned me to write a poem on one or more of the photographs on show at RIBA from the Edwin Smith archive. A fabulous job to get ! I already honed on on the image above because of its title.

This will be shown and also recorded for the show (has to be done in the next month).

I love Edwin Smith’s work and have found the above image which amazingly was taken in Nottingham and I hope is in the show.

A pdf guide available here:
http://www.architecture.com/Explore/ExhibitionsandEvents/Assets/Files/RIBAEdwinSmithSeasonGuide.pdf

The building still exists and the back story is amazing….

For more information please see the Edwin Smith pages on Roy Hammans excellent ‘Weeping Ash’ website which also features the wonderful Ray Moore.

http://www.fine-photographs.co.uk/index.php/photographers/es

edwindivine

Full details of a great and FREE show at R.I.B.A. here:

http://www.architecture.com/WhatsOn/September2014/OrdinaryBeautyThePhotographyOfEdwinSmith.aspx

The Archive Page here:

http://preview2-riba.contensis.com/Explore/ExhibitionsandEvents/EdwinSmith/Explore/EdwinSmithArchive/EdwinSmithArchive.aspx

Short Story and CW useful links

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

‘I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.’ William Faulkner

Short Stops website

http://shortstops.info/

Long Story, Short website

http://longstoryshort.squarespace.com/

Blot the skrip blog ( Dr. Stephen Carver)

http://blottheskrip.wordpress.com/

Lorrie Moore Interview Paris Review

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/510/the-art-of-fiction-no-167-lorrie-moore

Joseph O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut on writing

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Kurt Vonnegut

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters,make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world,so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. selves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

dogdays
Introduction to the 1997 Fish Anthology, Dog Days & Other Stories,
by Joseph O’Connor

What kind of strange creature is a short story writer? I must confess that I don’t know. A high priest or priest of art? A wounded soul who can’t understand the real world and thus feels a need to re-invent it? A moralist? A spinner of yarns? An entertainer? A prophet? Probably all of these things. Possibly none.

The single fact I can be sure about is this: writers are watchers. The one and only thing they have in common is an ability to look at the everyday world and be knocked out by it. Stopped in their tracks. Startled. Gobsmacked.

My favourite short story writer, Raymond Carver, has this to say:

Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks, or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset, or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.

Another writer I love, Flannery O’Connor, put it even more strongly:

There is a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.

There is only one trait that writers have in common and that’s it. They watch for the extraordinary magic that lies in the everyday. A writer is always quietly looking and thinking. Not willing inspiration but just being open to the world. This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination. It’s letting in ideas. It’s trying, I suppose, to make some sense of things.

In that sense, it is important for a writer to be always writing. Even when you’re not actually sitting with a pen in your hand. You don’t take days off. You don’t go on holiday from writing. Sometimes you don’t even go to sleep. If you’re serious about writing then you’re a writer twenty-four hours a day, in the office, in school, doing the dishes and in your dreams.

Writers have their eyes open. They keep them open all the time.

Ezra Pound said ‘fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing’. Naming things, calling things what they really are. This is all writers can do in an age where language has become debased and sterile.

James Thurber was a full-time writer. His use of his spare time is interesting:

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing’. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No’, my wife says, ‘he’s writing something’.

The short story is one of the greatest, most challenging, most infuriating forms of literature. They look so easy! That’s the thing about really good short stories. They don’t read like they were written. They read like they simply grew on the page. When we read the work of a short story maestro like Joyce or Frank O’Connor or Richard Ford or Alice Munro or Mary Lavin, we think, yes, there is just a rightness about that sentence, that image, that line of speech. But anyone who has ever tried to write a short story will know just how tough it is to hit that reverberating note, to say something – anything at all – worthwhile about the human condition, in five thousand words or less. It’s hard.

A short story is a glance at the miraculous. Joyce used a religious word. He called his stories ‘epiphanies’. A good short story is almost always about a moment of profound realization. Or a hint of that. A quiet bomb. There is a record by the American singer Tori Amos called Little Earthquakes. That’s a good metaphor for a short story. Often, a good short story will be a little earthquake.

It is a form that has all the power of the novel – some would say more – but none of the self-importance. A deftly imagined and carefully written short story like Karl Iagnemma’s Dog Days, or Frank O’Donovan’s Johnny Mok’s Universe, or Anne O’Carroll’s Flame, by concentrating on the particular, can say a whole lot about the universal.

So let us get idealistic for a second or two. V.S. pritchett’s description of a short story is ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing’. And our task as short story writers is to grab that moment with both hands and invest it with all of the power and humanity and sympathy we can. To develop our skill at language and characterisation and structure and dialogue – our fundamental accuracy – for one reason. To tell the truth. That’s what all the hard work comes down to in the end.

If we forget that, we forget everything.

Joseph O’Connor
Dublin
1997

How Novelists Work..how mine don’t

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

harts

The first fiction session last night and a shock to the Belcher system…(unecessary elipsis there) asI am not a practicing fiction writer. The samples (vignettes, prose poems) I offered for appraisal were three very old items that I happened to have. ( ellipsis attempted but stopped mid-dot….!)

I quickly understood that writing fiction feels very different to poetry…( second uneccessary elipsis).Maura Dooley’s ‘different bus’ comment from the Seren ‘How Novelists Work’ book rang true.I took heart from a John Harvey chapter in the book where he said that he used to ‘fly off the handle and over-react’ to start with when edited but learnt to live and appreciate it and shows examples. I did not have any sulky moments and the round-table criticism was careful and appreciated. I hope I gave equally good comments back.

dooley

Maura Dooley Ed. How Novelists Work – Recommended
AMAZON

Because of the time lag between the examples it is hard to say why certain things are at fault. The David Belbin cardinal sin of using ‘as’ I simply never been told about before so that should be easy to correct as is ‘just'(note second deliberate use of as there hopefully correctly.(Smillie removed) These are basic errors that I need to learn and stamp out. Also The most basic of all is a lack of full stops but this may be a hangover from free verse poetry where frankly I hardly ever use punctuation. The same applies to commas so I getting my ‘Oxford Guide to Style’ out and keeping by the desk at all times. (Smillie removed)

Finally there is and perhaps a bigger worry and one that my friend Mik Godley would be more than happy to see eradicated. I have spent a long time online and have picked up a lot of bad habits and lazy text-speak mannerisms. Short-hand thinking not good enough any more. A lot of this from pure lack of time and I do not have that excuse any more so self-editing and replacing missing words starts now. Even writing a ‘blog’ entry of five hundred words better than filling a text box on a social media site with garbage so I will concentrate more on entries here which acting as a reflective journal and creative diary.

I have deliberately marked up mistakes in the above text in green or by strikethroughs to remind myself to think before writing NOT afterwards which would save me a great deal of time in the future. I have spent time improving my ‘academic’ style and can cope with academic papers now but this a different type of fish…I actually hope people will read this. (Smillie removed). 


I AM GOING BACK TO PEN AND PAPER

MISTAKES

OLS= over long sentences

NO full stops

ellipsis overkill

REDUND =redundant words/ repetitions.

AS = too many- delete

JUST- just-isms.

Also – not at start of sentence = redundant.

Adverbs – like ‘frankly’ redundant

ORIGINAL TEXTS

Here links to the original unedited fragments. I will over the rest of the week re-edit them into newer versions and post links next to original links. I doubt if any will make it off the first page in future but never say never. As David said concentrate on some new stuff and I have an idea and a title ….it is a start.

One was an intro introduction to a failed ‘Great British Rural Novel’ which got to staggered to ten pages in 1990 before going in the draw.
Crow in Barley

Crow in Barley Edited

The second was a strange historical snippet inspired by a true account of a landowner in Oxfordshire and his pet monkey and also inspired by Nick Cave songs. 2003.
Chalkfish and Monkey

Chalkfish and Monkey edited

The third was an aborted first draft of a non-existant Trailer Star movie or graphic novel. 2003.
Moon over the Downs

Moon over the Downs edited

The ‘real’ 12 line poem…Sunday Worship

September 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

flin

 

I was tasked with finding a poem not longer than 12 lines and thought I had only found one in 1987! However in sorting through old first draft folders I found a ‘coda’ type poem which for some reason I had left off the sequence from 1999 collected here as ‘Skeleton at the Plough’.

https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=117

I really do not know why I left it off..maybe because so short..maybe did not make sense. Maybe I thought it was rubbish at the time..who knows.

Here it is in its brevity anyway..all 6 lines so well within the limit and a strange thing it is…maybe the perfect opening or final poem in the ‘Farm-Hand’s Radio’ collection

Sunday Worship

 

In twilight, stooping to read unreadable words

Rain hard leached from the stones

I felt the country of my mind fall into place

And the country I was stood upon become unknown

As a parched desert, a rack of bones

At last I have returned to sing a silent song.

 

 

9.7.1999

 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing..at the time I probably thought it referred to my father’s village and that all. Looking back it written barely a year before my long-term relationship with a Spanish lady was about to disintegrate in November 2000 and set me careering away from Oxford probably forever in March 2002 to end up in Nottingham just as my father was diagnosed with cancer…

I had stopped singing that was for sure…

The Negative Owl – Mark Strand

September 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

darkerbewick

 

First lecture by Sarah Jackson and a surprise….a poem from a book I had not really paid attention to but had purchased many years ago…probably because of the cover. The image does indeed turn out to be a negative image of Bewick’s ‘White Owl’ engraving from page 89 of his ‘British Birds’ from 1809.

It entirely appropriate that the publisher has reversed the image and set in a quasi-gothic setting as Strand’s volume is full of darkness, ghosts, negative capability and the ‘uncanny’. In an excellent review in The Oxonian Alexander Nemser himself an American poet says what I felt after reading though the volume properly (possibly for the first time)

But, paradoxically, New Selected Poems leaves the reader with the impression of a poet who,in composing letters to himself about the ultimate end, has ended up only talking about the weather.

In fact in another very good interview with Wallace Shawn (a friend) in The Paris Review Strand states that almost all his poetry refers or is a ticking watch toward death. This fine but sometimes the use of short anglo-saxon words and the repetition..be it in Litany or instructions as in ‘The New Poetry Handbook’ does become somewhat claustrophobic. There is a repetition of certain strophes almost like a trance-like or meditative state. Strand himself believes in poetry as being ‘other’ a breaking through the boundary of the quotidian to other levels to the ‘magical and astonishing’ but sometimes the ‘other’ becomes airless and dank as if in need of some fresh air. Strand has written about artists and interestingly Edward Hopper who also the master of the limited view..the airless and unmoving. He also admires the Italian surrealists and indeed his knowledge of European languages and forms is displayed in his writing. The poetry has the flavour of Otavio Paz and Montale and it hard to find any trace of contemperaneous Canadian poetry like the Praire Poets . The compressed roomic spaces owe more to philosophy than landscape and bring to mind Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’.

What impressed me at the time and still impresses is this ‘non’USA’ atmosphere. He states in his own words that he attracted to an ‘international’ free-verse movement which he sees himself as part of. Now in his 80’s he has a substantial body of work and a very long and well supported academic career. There the nagging feeling that that very support and life in ‘academic rooms’ has stifled something….has led to the restricted and sometimes suffocating enjambment. The close control never seems to give, the opiates are dismissed, the night coils rather than releases and finally the ‘Screetch Owl’ is pinned like a moth in its final negative image….its museum like otherness.

 

Finally an erudite passage from the Paris Review…

Mark Strand on Poetry and Prose:

Well, I think a poet’s focus is not quite what a prose writer’s is; it’s not entirely on the world outside. It’s fixed on that area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet’s sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people, meets what he reads. So a poet describes that point of contact: the self, the edge of the self, and the edge of the world. That shadow land between self and reality. Sometimes the focus is tipped slightly in favor of the self, sometimes, more objectively, in favor of the world. And so sometimes, when the balance is tipped towards the self, strange things are said, odd things get into the poem. Because the farther you are from the world that everybody recognizes as the world, the stranger things look. I mean, some novels do this, but most don’t. Most novels are focused on what’s out there, and the novelist erases himself, by and large, to keep the narration going. There are some narrators who insert themselves, as Philip Roth does, brilliantly and amazingly. I’m always dazzled by his books. The world is electrically alive in American Pastoral, for example, but he’s there too: Roth is Zuckerman, and he’s there, he’s telling the story. We’re never unaware of the fact that he’s doing it, but we’re never wholly aware of the fact that he’s doing it. In a sense, that book is more magical than any poem I’ve read recently.  

Sources:

Paris Review Interview with Wallace Shawn
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1070/the-art-of-poetry-no-77-mark-strand

Alexander Nemser: Oxonian Review
http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/mark-strands-words-and-weather/

         Mark Strand: Poetry in The World – Essay

A 12 line poem….The Fallen Tree 1987

September 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

tree

A simple enough task…choose a poem you have written that not longer than 12 lines and bring to discuss in first session. Fine only I decided I would stick to rule and proceeded to search backwards through everything I had written until I found something that could be a poem and under 12 lines…I searched and I did not find…back and back I went until finally found a snippet from 1987! I cannot be accused of unnecessary brevity then! The ‘poem’ or snippet above is it…scanned in from the sketchbook pages it was on…at that time I would write ‘poetry’ next to observations and landscape drawings as I walked around the countryside.

The reason I found it is because being a slightly OCD library type I keep everything and alongside the original sketches I found a rather poe-faced ‘introduction’ for whom I have no idea as at this time I had not been published and frankly had no idea if post-1990 I would ever write again.

fires

However it does reveal the impact of Raymond Carver’s book ‘Fires’ even then which our second task which to identify a seminal and influential book of ‘modern’ (post 1950 say) poetry. I had chosen Fires before I found this old statement so I was right 🙂 Strangely looking at the old poems the influence of Carver had not really taken hold yet and I probably still mightily swayed by William Carlos Williams and Pasternak to name but two. The fire however was lit 🙂 Apologies in advance for the pompous introduction below:-)

MARGINALIA: The workshop referred to below was my very first creative writing class run at Birkbeck (I think memory awry) in 1985-6 I guess and run wonderfully by Martyn Crucefix who had yet to publish his first volume ‘Beneath Tremendous rain’. Stand out memory were two guest poets..Peter Forbes who I didn’t take to at all reading what seemed like the longest long poem ever and kept harking back to Byron ( hence his encouraging Glyn Maxwell to overdo the narrative) and Bob Cobbing who was tremendous and insane in equal measures and gave us some dadaist performance rants which basically screaming at top of voice..as I said unforgettable 😉

 

collected1

Collected Poems 1981 - 1989
An introduction.
These poems span ten years of my life so collecting them together from the scraps of paper and badly typed manuscripts has been a rewarding experience. The early poems (The Tithe Machine) arose out of an interest in American poetry fostered by a travelling exhibition of books which came to my local Didcot library in 1981 the year after I left art-college in London. Little did I know then that I would continue to write but the seed was planted. These early fragments (I had no idea how to make them any longer) deal with aspects of the area I grew up in but also try and suggest if not surreal landscape at least something slightly askew.
Poems like 'Valley' and 'Rehearsal' owe a lot to the Russian and French influences I was avidly consuming. They also reflect a lot of the painterly interests I had, Chagall, Gorky etc. Some I still like, some are awful.
I am not so happy with the next set' The New Country', the title taken from that given to the 30's left book and exhibition. At the same time as I was writing these I had an exhibition called 'The New Country' at a gallery in Islington, London. Looking back the best I can say is that although far happier in free verse I felt that somehow it wasn't poetry or that if I didn't at least learn or attempt versification I could not call myself a poet. I feel differently now but maybe it reflects a lack of confidence in the role of 'poet' i.e. where I come from you don't do it! Having said that I find some of the content O.K. e.g. the drowned fisherman in 'The fisherman's return' but not the rhyming schemes, or my attempts at this and that. I think I at least gained some 'musicality' from this phase.
Finally we come to 'Diesel on Gravel'. A collection of stuff written partly as a result of attending a workshop and working in a library and partly out of necessity when believe me the last thing on my mind was to attempt to be a poet, quite the opposite in fact! This lot I can put up with a lot more. Mostly the content has changed. Moving out of the fields and concentrating on relationships and interiors which I hurtled through in these years. Hopefully they come over as being more honest than the rather studied exploration of English landscape that went before. The most important influence in these years was Raymond Carver who's book 'Fires' I happened to pick up in a library where I worked. Here at last was somebody who seemed to speak the same 'working-class background' as I did as opposed to the Oxbridge voices. From then on I've tried to write about things that affect me as honestly and as well as I can.
 The very title 'Diesel on Gravel' the last section stands in my mind for the weight of U.S. culture on Britain and hopefully we can sort the good from the bad. Carver and the 'dirty realism' being one of the 'goods'. Looking back through this work it actually seems to make a bit more sense than it did before and I realise just how important my background is in what I'm writing about. The cast of poachers and ne'er do wells and village idiots have become more, not less, important to me. Perhaps because they exemplify a non-conformism which seems invisible in the Thames Valley today. All writing is political. I come from a background of labour politics and WEA learning. Education was the guiding light. Words are power. Nothing is more important as we approach the next turning point in British politics. Time me thinks for some rick-burning and protesting in the shires. Time for some smashing of the loom of words.
Shaun Belcher
Didcot, Oxon. March 1990.
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